THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 24 & 31, 2012
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crew, there was always too much drink-
ing: "At first, it s fine, but then guys start
hitting each other in the face," Vadim
said. "Then they wake up and can t re-
member who hit who in the face. It causes
problems.") But they missed the Soviet
merchant marine. The pay was worse but
the friendships lasted longer. And the
crews were co-ed. There was never any
trouble finding companionship aboard
the Shota Rustaveli or the Maxim Gorky.
Later that night, I went down to the
galley to get a drink of water. Someone
was watching an adult movie in the
crew rec room. On my way back up, I
ran into Vadim coming out of the ship s
office. The crew s satellite phone was in
there, but whom would he have been
calling? He was estranged from his ex-
wife, and I knew he didn t have a steady
girlfriend. The next day, he admitted
that he d been calling a friend in Odessa
to learn the latest scores of his beloved
soccer team, the Chernomortsi.
The Russians, led by Vitus Bering,
mapped the contours of the North-
east Passage, largely by land, in the sev-
enteen-thirties and forties, but it was
only in 1878-79 that anyone sailed the
entire route, and it wasn t until the sum-
mer of 1932 that a ship, the icebreaker
Sibiryakov, made the navigation in one
season. Steel and coal, not high atmo-
spheric concentrations of carbon dioxide,
were what initially conquered the ice.
But what was happening now was un-
precedented. When Mads Petersen, the
co-chairman of Nordic Bulk, first sent his
cargo of iron ore from Norway through
the Arctic, in 2010, he had done so in
September, the month when the ice is at
its minimum; he did so again in 2011.
Never before had he sent a ship in July.
But we were making decent time. And
when the Odyssey came back through
here, in August, there would be less ice.
When it came back again in September,
there would be hardly any ice at all.
Yet Mads Petersen was the only per-
son I talked to in the Arctic who believed
in man-made global warming. The dep-
uty head of Rosatomflot smiled when
I asked him about it ("This stuff is cy-
clical"), and so did my friend Vadim,
who thought that the theory of global
warming was a Western hoax. Captain
Shkrebko conceded that monsoons had
grown stronger in recent years, and that
the tides and currents he encountered
were not the ones indicated on the Brit-
ish Admiralty charts, but that was as far
as he would go. And the ice pilot,
Cherepanov, claimed to be especially
tickled at the thought that the earth was
warming and the ice was melting. "So the
U.N. did a study, huh?" he kept saying of
the 2007 I.P.C.C. climate report, which
I had made the mistake of citing. "Well,
if the U.N. says it s true, it must be true."
IgaveVadimacopyofabookIhad
brought with me about global warming,
but I don t think his English was up to it,
and it lay unread on the bridge until I
took it back to my cabin.
Post-Soviets tend to be skeptical about
global warming. But there are notable ex-
ceptions. Earlier this year, Vladimir Putin
hosted a team of scientists from the
Vostok Research Station, Russia s leading
research station in Antarctica. In the
nineteen-eighties, researchers at Vostok
were the first to extract an ice core cover-
ing a full glacial-interglacial cycle, which
was crucial for confirming the hypothesis
that carbon-dioxide levels and tempera-
ture are connected. So when President
Putin asked Vladimir Lipenkov, from
the Arctic and Antarctic Research Insti-
tute of St. Petersburg, whether the scien-
tist really believed that human-made
greenhouse gases were a significant fac-
tor in global climate, Lipenkov did not
back down. "No one denies that," he said.
"No, no," Putin said. "There are ex-
perts who believe that the changes in the
climate are unrelated to human activity,
that human activity has just a minimal,
tiny effect, within the margin of error."
Lipenkov s answer was categorical: "It
is not within the margin of error. If you
look at the last five hundred thousand
years, according to the data from Vostok
Station, it turns out that the level of car-
bon dioxide and the change in tempera-
ture are correlated; that is to say, they
have always moved practically together.
Right now, according to atmospheric
measurements, the level of carbon diox-
ide in the atmosphere is significantly
higher than at any time in the last five
hundred thousand years."
In the East Siberian Sea, we encoun-
tered a different kind of ice from any
we d seen before. It was thicker and older,
and, most impressive of all, it stretched
north as far as the eye could see. The ice
we d encountered thus far was drifting
along---it had become detached from the
great polar ice pack---whereas the ice here
was part of the pack, and it looked almost
like land. It wasn t, of course, land, and in
fact it wasn t even stable; all the ice in the
Arctic, since it lies atop the ocean, is sub-
ject to the currents of that ocean, and is
therefore always in motion. Because of the
Transpolar Drift---which takes ice from
the Russian side and past the Pole, where
it eventually floats by Greenland and into
the Atlantic---the oldest ice in the Arctic
is rarely more than ten years old.
But this system has been here contin-
uously for millions of years, developing
during that time a complete ecology, from
the algae that bloom underneath the ice
and the copepods that thrive on its edge,
to the cod that eat them, to the seals that
eat the cod, to the white bears, kings of
the Arctic, whose great paws have wid-
ened over time so the bears can walk on
ice that would seem too thin to support
their weight. And, seeing the ice that is at
the center of this ecosystem, we smashed
right into it.
We went slowly, at times very slowly.
Looking out, you d have thought we
were in a snow field---it was white in all
directions, save for the black-and-red
stern of the Yamal. It was now clear that
we would make it through the ice. We
were just too big not to. Yet at some
point in the East Siberian Sea I began
to hope that we would lose. Here was a
landscape that we were simply causing
to disappear. We carried sixty-seven
thousand tons of iron ore. Add to this
about thirty-seven thousand tons of
coking coal, some limestone, and a lot
of heat and you could forge about fifty
thousand tons of steel---enough steel
for three ships just like the Odyssey.
And each of those ships would beget
three more ships. We would breed ships
like rabbits, and I wondered why. The
owner of our ship, Mads Petersen, was
in daily e-mail contact with our cap-
tain, and one time he called the satellite
phone on the bridge to say hello. "Mr.
Mads!" Captain Shkrebko exclaimed
into the phone, and eventually passed
the receiver to me. Petersen asked, Was
it a great adventure? Yes, I said, it was a
great adventure. And the ship, I added,
was a powerful ship, which needed to
fear no ice. "Yeah," Petersen agreed.
"It s a lot of steel." He didn t yet know